Peppermint 9 Released.

Team Peppermint are pleased to announce Peppermint 9, the latest iteration of our operating system. Based on the 18.04 LTS (long term support) code base, Peppermint 9 still comes in both 64bit and 32bit flavors so older hardware is still supported. We hope you enjoy using it half as much as we did putting it together.

Peppermint 9 highlights:-

We have replaced lxrandr with xfce4-display-setttings for monitor settings as we continue to look for better options that add functionality without adding weight, and to continue the migration away from the few remaining LXDE components.

By user request the Menulibre menu editor is now installed by default, and no longer breaks the menus as it did in previous Peppermint versions.

Continuing the theme of improved menu and launchere management, there is now a right-click “Create new launcher here” desktop context menu item.

The Nemo file manager now has a right-click “Send by email” context menu item. (requires an email client such as Thunderbird to be installed).

The Panel Reset function in the Peppermint Settings Panel no longer needs to log you out of your session to reset the panel

The Xfce Panel Switch utility is now installed by default, so you can now backup/restore any custom panel configurations and switch between them. It includes a Peppermint-9 default profile and a few others to play with.

The system Notification Settings (in the settings panel) now has a “Do Not Disturb” function, or notifications can be enabled/disabled on a per application basis.

Qt applications such as VLC now honor the system Gtk theme.

Gtk overlay scrollbars are now enabled by default, they’re growing on us ;)

The graphical screenshot utility has switched from pyshot to xfce4-screenshooter.

Symlinks are in place so any installed Snaps and Flatpaks will now show up in the main menu.

There is a new “find your mouse cursor” keyboard shortcut (Alt+C)

The Chromium web browser has been replaced Firefox again (who knows, one day we might make our minds up) ;)

New Gtk Themes, based on Arc but with a few tweaks and some additional color choices, including the red default.

Awesome new Artwork courtesy of Karl Schneider .. many thanks Karl.

New Microsoft Office Online SSB’s .. Even though these are simply links to the free online ‘web app’ version of Office, we are fully aware some people won’t like anything containing the word ‘Microsoft’ on their system, so please be aware they are easily removed from within the ICE application with just a couple of mouse clicks.

New Skye Web Client SSB. This is mainly for 32bit users because Microsoft no longer create a 32bit native skype client for Linux. So if you’re running 32bit Peppermint and require Skype, this is the only way to access it.

ICE now has a few international translations (and will gain more over time via updates), it has also been fixed to remove the ‘half’ green lock symbol that displayed when on SSL sites.

The Kernel is now the 4.15 series (4.15.0-23 on the ISO)

The Nemo file manager is now verion 3.6.5

We’re now back at with the upstream Ubuntu version of Gdebi which has the uninstall option (the previous version did not).

And Peppermint 9 is now the 18.04 LTS code base, so has access to all the latest software.

As with previous releases we invite you to compare Peppermint to other operating systems, we are confident you will be impressed. To take the Peppermint 9 out for a test drive, please visit our website at peppermintos.com where you can download it for free. If you need help installing the Peppermint 9, or have any questions about using it, we have a second-to-none user support team at forum.peppermintos.com please drop in even if only for a chat with friendly like-minded people .. hope to see you there.

About Peppermint OS

Peppermint OS is a software company, originally based in Asheville, North Carolina but now operating out of Cornwall England. Founded in 2010, we are committed to building the best operating system for both enterprise and consumers available on the widest range of devices. To find out more about us, please visit https://peppermintos.com.

enthusiastic

Mark Greaves

Theoretically we could do a do-dist-upgrade script, but it would require us modifying config files in the users home directory .. we decided long ago modifying anything in there is ‘off limits’ because of the risk of undoing user applied customisations.

It is a sad fact that even with the best of intentions and the solidest of technologies, occasionally do-dist-upgrade’s go wrong, and they often don’t encourage a strong “backup first” ethos/culture. I mean think of this situation – A user has full disk encryption and hasn’t stored his encryption key somewhere safe, he also hasn’t backed up because he trusts the do-dist-upgrade script .. and the upgrade fails. He may well have just permanently lost access to everything on his system, and we would be in the sad position of not being able to offer any kind of useful support.

We’d MUCH rather people moan at us for not having an easy upgrade path than moan at us because they just lost all their data ;)
(not because we’re afraid of being moaned at, but because we’d rather they not have lost their data in the first place).

We’re fully aware that some may view this as a ‘cop out’ and that’s fine, in a lot of ways they’d be correct in that view ;)

Mark Greaves

clatterfordslim

Thank you guys, for the much dedicated hard work you put into your OS. I have a few questions starting with, was the move to 18.04 harder to get going, than 16.04? X player is not available at all in 18.04, do you know when it will be available, as much as I love VLC I love simple Media Players and X player does it all. I can probably answer this as Linux Mint 19 is in Beta still, so probably after they release Mint properly? I love Peppermint OS, you guys deserve a massive pat on the back and no doubt rest, for making such a fantastic OS. I didn’t think you could top Peppermint 8, but you guys and gals keep surprising us users with something new and exciting to use. Thank you all.

Carlos S

Mark Greaves

containscaffeine

I really liked your implementation of the screenshot utility in peppermint os 7 and 8 (My one and only OS on my HP Notebook). That allows me to take a quick screenshot anytime. Now, I have not tried peppermint os 9 yet but in various other distros where the xfce4-screenshooter is used (like Manjaro Xfce, MX Linux to name a few), when I press the Prt Scr button, the screenshot dialog box appears and then I can take the screenshot. This is counter intuitive for me. Most of the times I want to take a very quick screenshot where even loosing a mili sec changes the screenshot. Please revert back to the previous screenshot utility.
In addition, just for comparison sake with the proprietary os, I like the Greenshot app, but it is not available for Linux even though it is open source. This app freezes the screen while taking a screenshot. Any chance of implementing this functionality in peppermint os?

Mark Greaves

Pressing the PrtSc key in Peppermint 9 behaves exactly the same as it did in Peppermint 7 and 8 .. it just immediately takes a screenshot and dumps it on your desktop, and Ctrl+PrtSc does the same for just the active window (neither open the screenshot utility first), rest assured we’ve not changed that :)

Joe

Hi Peppermint team! Just wanted to thank you for the awesome o.s you’ve put together, I have tried many Linux Distros over the years, and Peppermint 8 has been probably my favourite one and the one I´ve been using the longest. It is rock solid, has never crushed, works flawlessly, it’s amazing, boots in less than 30 sec … I am truly in love with this o.s, soon I’ll try out ver. 9. Thank you team for the fantastic work you do! Keep it up!

Mark Greaves

artik

Any plan to make a universe available kernal distribution utilizing the kernel modifications made by the GalliumOS group and/or Peppermint staff’s own custom kernel development (pain in the ass and WHY not fork and beyond off GalliumOS project’s fantastic and indepth work covering almost every single Chromebook device and bug troubleshoot support within each niche–very neat).

I have to always use my mouse + leafpad doc with all the commands I need + copy&paste + terminal =
Use of the galliumos 4.9~ kernel mod for my current (ly used decide for this post) and Acer Chromebook to enable my abilities (in full without any loss of hardware function, audio, wifi, keyboard etc ALL functional) to the fullest when cross-impremented alongside the great work of your distro flavor’s smooth low resource highly effective and productive ubuntu flavor.

Just a thought :) it would drive a MASSIVE (much much larger than I had thought when I was orginally just eff’ing around with my son’s device here–) of Chromebook devices user base TOWARDS Peppermint (*OS8! not 9 yet) to the already semi-viable for Peppermint OS joining the two with Chromebooks basically out-of-the-box plug-and-play ready as well.

Give it a thought! (I am sure you have before and wondered if the niche was covered and well-maintened enough with the galliumos team… and not to speak out of school or anything because I am truly indebted to their dev team for the hardwork they have done on getting a smooth pNp Linux ubuntu based system easily accessible and manageable to install for Chromebook users of all levels of expertise.

*9 is NOT working at all with any Kernel I jam down it’s throat… looks to be a systemd xinit light-display management locker etcetc issue. I will debug it later tonight after work.

Mark Greaves

Marti

Peppermint 8 is on my (old) Acer 5517 laptop. The 8 LiveCD worked with the Broadcom card with no tweaking. I tried the Peppermint 9 LiveCD and there is not even an “Enable Wi-Fi” option (that I could see). My (even older) desktop has Peppermint 5 and a USB wi-fi adapter (looks like a little antenna) works just fine with it.

Gordon Sage

Love the new release! One issue though. I want to use this distro on my old laptop.It does not support usb boot and only has a cd drive making it difficult to install. I need a 700 mb iso for installation. I am currently running lubuntu 32 bit and used a net install iso. Would it be too difficult to do likewise with Peppermint to support older hardware like mine?

Mark Greaves

If the machine cannot boot from a USB stick, have you tried using Plop boot manager to create a bootable floppy or CD .. this can then be used to boot Linux on a USB stickhttps://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

molop

Thank everyone for new version of peppermint:) I just install it from version 8 and it’s splendid. It’s so fantastic and works excellent on recent kernel. Great job to everyone. Oh and to the question above I use multi writer from gnome repository to create usb live boot of peppermint 9 and I can confirm it work perfectly so I guess Gordon Sage used wrong program to create one.
Ones again many thanks for team that made that fantastic os. I said to myself that finally I found ideal operation system and definetly it’s Peppermint.

Ydejart

I don’t usually write reviews, but I have to give the Pep team two huge thumbs up! I have tried a lot of Distros (as I’m sure many Linux users have) and have never had one that delivers everything I want, other than Peppermint. Works FLAWLESS! Minimal, beautiful, and just plain works.

Thank you again, Pep team. You guys have made someone (and a lot of others) very happy.

Mark Greaves

darkmega.bin

Great Release! i do have a question though? is it possible to replace the default LXDE with XFCE? while i do appreciate having an LXDE with some XFCE stuff, could it be an option to Completely replace LXDE with XFCE?

Mark Greaves

Whilst it certainly would be possible, I couldn’t comment on how “easy” this would be. But if you want the full Xfce without the benefits of a lighter session manager, wouldn’t it be easier to just start with Xubuntu ?

Mark Greaves

POPPIE

Mark – has taken 6 years to find/thank you!! On my very first Linux install – Peppermint 3 – you responded to an SOS, showing me how add proper drivers for E-mu 1820M audio system. Have worked exclusively with Linux since. [Your reply also mentioned you lived in Cornwall, and it was the middle of the night for you.] Again – thank you.

Mark Greaves

Hi Papanya Pasya, sorry to hear you’re having problems.
It would be helpful if you could post your issue on the support forum:https://forum.peppermintos.com
Where we’ll try out best to get to the bottom of the issue.
TIA.

Angelos

Great operating system. I use it on my very old laptop and it way WAY faster than windows 7 which I had prior to peppermint. It is lightweight, nice looking, intuitive,easy to use and aimed towards new users as it uses a more traditional looking desktop. Due to the fact that it is lightweight and fast it is the os of my choice for any kind of underpowered machine. The only problems I had with it were that it crashed and stop working a lot but isn’t a dealbreaker for me

Mark Greaves

And greetings right back at you from Cornwall UK Leonel, many thanks for getting in touch and letting us know you’ve been using Peppermint for some time and are enjoying it. Sorry the reply was in English but I never quite trust Google translate ;)

Torin Doyle

BTW, I posted a second comment today (I thought the first one did not go through properly) as my comment from 8-Aug only got published now (13-Aug). You can ignore the second comment as it’s near identical. Cheers.

Mahir

Steven Mills

Is there a way to upgrade to 9.0 from 8.0 Respin? After testing Manjaro, Mint 18 KDE/Cinnamon, Ubuntu, Arch, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mint 17/17.1 in various forms..Peppermint was the one I fell in love with. I’d love to upgrade to 9, but I want to be lazy first, and see if there’s a way to do so, from terminal in 8?

Mark Greaves

I’m sorry Max, but if we pre-installed ALL web browsers, we’d then get asked to install ALL office suites, then ALL media players, etc. .. where would it end ?
Not to mention Peppermint is a ‘minimal install’ distro, at least where applications are concerned, so that would fly in the face of our ethos.

Translated to English:
All Linux distributions usually bring a browser, it is usually uncommon to bring several browsers or programs of the same type.
The best option is to install it with this simple command:
sudo apt install chromium-browser
That command will install Chromium which is the open-source version of Google’s well-known Chrome browser.
If you want to install Midori you can do it by changing the word chromium-browser by midori in the command that I have written above.
If you want to install Chrome, Opera or Yandex you can do it by downloading the installation package DEB from their official webs.

Mark Greaves

Gsry M

Congrats on a great distribution! I am impressed at the minimalism and the robustness all at the same time. Will work great in my business! I do have two questions: Do you have any contingency plans with the Canonical IPO? I mean, if the Ubuntu base is affected do you have other plans to keep the distro going? Secondly, how can I make the screen cursor larger for my 32″ display? I do not see any menu settings for changing cursor size?

Thanks and keep up the great work!!

Mark Greaves

Hi Gary,
Canonical IPO – Currently we don’t have any contingency plans that are ‘specifically’ about the IPO, shifting base would always be an option and is something we always have an eye on anyway. We don’t see that the IPO will affect Ubuntu core components anyway, they’re making too much money from the cloud ‘as is’.
Cursor Size – Currently the easiest method for doing this may simply be to install a larger cursor theme:https://forum.peppermintos.com/index.php/topic,4080.msg42672.html#msg42672

tdockery97

Been using Peppermint 8 for a while now. I have been a habitual distro-hopper in the past. Now every time I try another distro I find myself right back on the Pepp. I’m thinking of moving up to 9, but 8 is so flawless I just can’t pull myself away. I haven’t read of anything that would be done better in 9 than 8, other than a longer support period. Decisions, decisions LOL.

Mark Greaves

Hi tdockery97,
As you suggest, there’s still plenty of life left in Peppermint 8, so no crazy rush to move to 9, make the jump whenever it suits.
Thanks for taking the time to let us know we ruined distro hopping for you .. sorry about that :)

Ezinwanne

Mark Greaves

In your home folder, there is a hidden file called .face
If you replace that file with another .jpg or .png it should be used as your profile picture .. but it MUST be renamed to .face (with no extension).

This type of question is normally best asked on the support forum:https://forum.peppermintos.com
We don’t generally monitor this blog anywhere near as much as the forum ;)

Fernando Lopes

Effectively Peppermint OS is my first choice in the last few years. For me, comparing with others (I’ve tried tens and tens until now, even during preceding months), Peppermint 9 is the best: low ram usage and faster than other distributions opening the majority of applications. The average performance is so good that old machines can work satisfactorily with Peppermint OS. Forget Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint’s, Lite, Devuan and some Debian based on distros reputed as lightweight.

Mark Greaves

mintinstall in our opinion is laid out better, and has more intuitive flatpack support. It also displays the “peppermint packs” and more accurately reflects all packages in the repos .. but has NO snap support.

gnome-software on the other hand supports snaps (and flatpaks, but not as intuitively as mintinstall), but it doesn’t display the peppermint packs, and doesn’t display all the packages in the repos.

So in the absence of a software manager that currently supports all three options equally well (flatpaks/repos/snaps) .. we decided the only way to offer users the full extensive software library available to Peppermint 9 was to install both.

Kit Walker

Thanks so much for continuing to support 32-bit machines — I have moved to Peppermint since “Linux Lite” dropped support for this older hardware. There’s still a lot of 32-bit silicon in the world.

This comment is typed on an HP Compaq nc6000 laptop, 1.4 Ghz 32-bit single core CPU, 1GB RAM. I really like this machine’s 1400×1050 display — it’s impossible to find a laptop with a 4:3 screen thesedays. Peppermint goes like a rocket on this machine!

Thanks again :)

Mark Greaves

I think that fact that peppermint caters well to older systems almost demands a 32-bit ISO to be available. I’ve put peppermint on some ancient systems and they run beautifully. Obviously, the 64-bit ISO runs great on newer systems. But, when my friends get rid of their older systems (and give them to me :) LOL), peppermint breathes new life into them.

Suraj

Mark Greaves

I’m afraid there’s no ‘upgrade’ path, moving to Peppermint 9 requires a full reinstallation. That said there’s no hurry to move to 9 yet, Peppermint 8 will be supported until 2021 so just make the move when you’re good and ready.

Alex

Have to say I’m very impressed about this distro. I installed it a few days ago and its working like a charm. Perfect distro for an out of the box experience. Performance is also appreciated, consuming very low resources even by loading tons of applications. I need more time for a final verdict, but so far I’m loving it.
Congrats to the team!

Kevin H

Mark Greaves

This is for Peppermint 9 64bitISO = 1.4GB
All files on a LiveUSB/LiveDVD = 2.7GB
All files on a running fresh install (excluding the /proc/kcore file) = 4.7GB
All files on a running fresh install (excluding the /proc/kcore file and the 512MB swap file) = 4.2GB

Notes:-

Fresh install was to a Virtualbox VM
The /proc/kcore file was excluded because its a virtual memory map, so on a running 64bit system would APPEAR to add 140.7TB to the system (but in reality doesn’t take up disk space at all).

Huntergirl

I’ve recently installed Peppermint 9 on two elderly netbooks, and it’s lovely. I had a bit of difficulty getting one of them online, but the folks in the support forum were very patient and helpful and I’m writing from that machine now. Love this OS.

satish

Alan

Since last year i’m working on IT for a secondary school here on Chile, I switched an entire computing lab and many other computers arround here to PepperMint Linux version 8, it has been a flawless experience, compared to the” new self introduced software-drivers failures nightmare-fest” windows 10 Update has become. now it’s time to upgrade with an O.S. built on a carefully hand picked selection of software that does what it is meant to do, wellcome Peppermint OS 9!.
PS: Many of the students have asked me if i could install “that OS from the Linux lab” on their computers because it runs like nothing on old computers, imagine what it could do on their shiny new hardware, also most of them are sick of MS.

Robert not the Bruce

Peppermint9 Yeh! I downloaded the ISO and installed it on my old laptop. K. I used the 8 version and i really love this distro. So, 9, what’s new ?..i cannot get my wifi working, and couldn’t find any info on the forum so far…What i would like to say is this; why was the network settings department changed? I liked the way the steps to connect to the internet, very easy. This new 9 version…i seem to be missing out something, what it is..? Ah yeh, knowledge how to create a connection? Once again, me noobisticus modernicus liked the 8 version to connect way more easier then this 9. End of story; get in to it man and do your homework! But me..being lazy, yep, i went back to the Peppermint 8 version. Just because of this? Just because of this. Are there more of you? Perhaps..to be continued. Anyway, muchas gracias for this wonderful and cabled OS. Thumbs up!

Mark Greaves

Likely a Broadcom driver issue, hands up we messed up there with the Peppermint 9 ISO, it’ll be fixed in the respin (likely due next month some time). Meanwhile if you post on the forum the output from:lspci -vnn | grep -i net
We’ll be happy to assist.
Can you also confirm whether or not you’re currently able to connect to the intenet via an ethernet cable.